"We will see," Heena replied cryptically, keeping her dark eyes glued to the damp soil and rotting logs lining the forest floor.
She wasn't looking for fruit. Fruit was obvious, and the AI was right—the commoners would have picked it clean. She was looking for mushrooms.
In her experience, the average peasant was utterly terrified of wild fungi. Without proper medical or botanical knowledge, eating a random forest mushroom was a game of lethal roulette, so most uneducated locals simply avoided them entirely. Heena, on the other hand, was not an herbalist, but she had spent enough time surviving in brutal wilderness environments to identify at least a few basic, non-lethal varieties. If she could find a patch of safe caps growing in the damp underbrush, she could boil them back at the shop. It wouldn't be a feast, but it would stop her stomach from trying to digest itself.
And, of course, there was a secondary, much more ambitious hope flickering in the back of her starved mind.
